Rebuilding Volkswagen Vans

A few years after our success with Volkswagen UK, which thanks to its unique qualities got special permission to go beyond Volkswagen's global website guidelines, we successfully pitched for Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, a.k.a. Volkswagen Vans.

Selling vans is a very different process from selling passenger cars. Customers may range from sole traders buying an Amarok pickup as much as family as business transport, via small businesses employing several white van persons to major national brands like British Gas whose van orders may number in the hundreds. In all cases the website is mostly not self-contained within the process. Instead it tends to play the part of an information source and reference point for sales conversations that typically begin on the phone and continue as face-to-face conversations.

For the new site therefore the required user journey ended not in a test drive – or even a visit to the Business Centre- but in a phone call.

The existing site was huge, somewhat chaotic with a great deal of duplicated content -- and of course not responsive. Many pages had very little content: effectively virtually empty nodes in a complex navigation schema. One key job was to conduct a thorough content audit and weed out the dross, then group related items to identify content suitable to be aggregated in longer scrolling pages.

The result was successful: it was voted What Van's best website 2013, with a score of 10/10 for accessibility and ease of use.